Services Marketing: : Australia and New Zealand

Citation

Danaher, P.J. (1998), "Services Marketing: : Australia and New Zealand", European Journal of Marketing, Vol. 32 No. 9/10, pp. 922-924. https://doi.org/10.1108/ejm.1998.32.9_10.922.1

The decade of the 1990s has been the decade for world‐wide growth in service industries. A corresponding growth in the subject of Services Marketing has emerged and Christopher Lovelock has been at the forefront of this field. The first edition of Lovelock’s Services Marketing came out in 1984 and since then his book has become standard reading in the services arena. This edition of the book is adapted to the Australian and New Zealand service industries. Several Australasian adaptations of well‐known Marketing Management and Marketing Research books have appeared in the last five years. Many of these adaptations pay only lip service to the Australasian region, perhaps with a few local cases or examples. In contrast, this adaptation “involved reworking every chapter to reflect current practice in Australia and New Zealand”. Five new chapters were added “to reflect contemporary issues”. The result is an up‐to‐date Services Marketing book that truly has an Australasian feel. Given the increasing internationalisation of service industries, particularly in fast food, airlines and hotels, the need for an Australasian Service Marketing book seems less pressing. However, anyone who has taught Services Marketing knows the value of having examples that students can relate to easily, such as Telstra, Optus, Qantas and Air New Zealand.

The book is split into four main parts, Understanding Services, Understanding the Customer and Managing Relationships, Strategic Issues in Services Marketing and Challenges for Senior Management.

I found the first chapter to be a little cursory, probably because first chapters always are. It covered many topics, ranging from quality control problems to government regulation, only superficially. The cases at the end of the chapter were very inconsistent in their rigour and depth. The “Rakaia RiverRunners” (p. 71) was not much more than a hard luck story. The next case “Marketing Information Technology” (p. 74) started with promise but ended abruptly. These two cases contrasted poorly with the third case on Singapore Airlines (p. 80) which gives an extremely detailed analysis of the international airline industry and tracks Singapore Airlines’ performance in marketing and service over several years.

Part II of the book is the highlight for me. There are three chapters in this part, comprising Customer Behaviour in Service Settings, Customer Satisfaction and Service Quality (with an appendix on Measuring Customer Satisfaction) and Relationship Marketing and Management. In these chapters the authors discuss the relationship between customer satisfaction and loyalty, SERVQUAL and the recently‐emerged field of Relationship Marketing. This part also uses several examples from Patterson’s own research in Australia. My only criticism of Part II is that the appendix on measuring customer satisfaction should be integrated with the chapter on Customer Satisfaction and Service Quality. This appendix is very informative and gives the reader many sound pointers about designing customer satisfaction surveys. I know that book appendices tend to be ignored in the classroom and it would be a shame for this appendix to be treated in this way. The readings and cases for Part II are much improved compared with Part I.

Part III continues the good work of the previous part, getting into strategic issues, such as defining the target market (not a common feature of research in Services Marketing), competitive positioning, creating new services, servicescapes, pricing, managing capacity and advertising and promotion. These chapters cover off much of the “how to” side of services. At this stage the reader should be impressed with the body of knowledge that has evolved specifically for service industries. These chapters are not a straightforward application of Marketing Principles, but a well‐crafted set of guidelines tailored to service industries. One point here is that the technical topics of these chapters, such as yield management, would benefit from having some more detailed treatment. That is, the need and relevance of yield management is apparent, but the reader cannot go away and conduct a yield management exercise of their own.

The final part of the book is a collection of unrelated chapters covering, service management, handling complaints, international services marketing and the impact of information technology. The fourth chapter in Part IV on the impact of IT gives us a taste for the what customer can expect in the future and the third chapter is something of an answer to the demand for attention to international marketing. I think the chapter on complaint handling could easily be placed in Part II on Understanding the Customer and Managing Relationships. The impression left from reading Part IV is that while the chapters are well‐written, they do not “hang together”.

In conclusion, this is a substantial textbook, covering one of the fastest growing fields in Marketing. It is more than just a superficial adaptation of Lovelock’s classic text, it is a stand‐alone volume on Service Marketing in Australasia. While the authors say that it is suitable for undergraduate, postgraduate and executive courses, I think its niche is in an advanced undergraduate course or an introductory executive course on Services Marketing.